ClickDimensions Social Engagement for Microsoft Dynamics. First Look!

I was treated to a preview of ClickDimensions Social Engagement (8.8) in the last week, and I was left exceedingly impressed with the capabilities of this new platform. Released to partners at the end of July, it is available now for existing ClickDimension customers.

What is ClickDimensions Social Engagement (CSE)?

CSE is a brand new offering from ClickDimensions, and is supplied as an add-on module to existing ClickDimension customers. ClickDimensions has partnered with Social Media solution vendor Oktopost to provide a lot of the functionality you’re about to see.

At a high level, CSE provides your organisation with a simple yet powerful platform to manage all your social media activity.

The key features of the solution are:

Does this mean that we won’t need Microsoft Social Engagement (MSE)? What are the differences?

In short no, while they do overlap in certain features they both have their strengths and weaknesses. For instance, you can schedule all your posts to a calendar (incredibly useful!), whereas MSE posts your material immediately to various social platforms (no scheduling). While MSE comes with inbuilt rules that convert your posts to leads/cases, whereas CSE converts posts and stores them in what is known as the Inbox that presumably you could build workflows and do the same. Sentiment analysis is also only available to the MSE platform. So they have similar features but work in very different ways. In my opinion CSE is targeted more for marketing whilst MSE caters more for social analytics.

What does it look like?

Once the solution is installed, it opens in a separate window and provides you with your social listening dashboard. Configuration is achieved through the settings menu where you can specify social connectors, search phrases and so forth.

The analytics and scheduling system is pretty impressive, packed with a lot of useful information such as knowing when is the best time of day/week to post.

And a basic breakdown of which networks are your customers engaging on.

The leader board system is something quite refreshing, introducing new tools that score your social engagement efforts among team members (game on!).

Final thoughts

Social Engagement tools have come a long way particularly in the Microsoft Dynamics ISV space. It has been pretty obvious that social selling, social engagement and social perception of companies is becoming more of a priority to companies and the maturity of the tools you see today really reflect that.

The ClickDimensions winning feature in my opinion is how easy it is to schedule your posts, across networks, and from your marketing teams. This is core to the solution, and the process couldn’t be more simple. Though I haven’t read too much about potential extensions on the platform, it would be really good to be able to have the ability to create business rules that redirect inbound social posts to queues, cases and leads like MSE does. But overall, this is a fantastic product and cost/benefit wise it’s an exceptional offering aimed exactly at the right audience (SMEs, B2Bs). Looking forward to seeing more of this new platform!